Her voice was low with regret and pain. His soul stirred with sympathy.
"You have much to regret in losing your father so soon," he said. "I can not tell you what mine was to me, what a mentor, what a friend, until his death nearly three years ago."
"Three years!" she echoed, faintly, and the pretty eggshell china tea-cup fell from her hands to the carpet, crashing into a dozen fragments.
"Oh, dear, how very careless I am!" she exclaimed, dismayed at the attention she attracted by her accident. She saw Jewel looking at her with jealous suspicion, but took no notice, and as a servant appeared to remove the débris, she turned smilingly back to her companion and said, lightly:
"Everything slips through my fingers," and added, miserably, to herself, "Love and happiness with the rest!"
He was about to reply with some admiring sentence, when he saw Jewel coming over to them with a bright smile that was assumed to veil her jealous spite.
"Laurie, what did you say to Miss Brooke to shock her into breaking her tea-cup?" playfully.
He answered, as he rose to place a chair for her:
"Nothing."
Azalia Brooke looked up at her with artless cordiality.